


One-Shot Collection: Person of Interest

by StuntMuppet



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, One Shot Collection, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-29
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-23 02:01:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2529881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StuntMuppet/pseuds/StuntMuppet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various one-shots, meme responses, comment fics, and other fics too short to get their own posts. This is the Person of Interest one-shot post. Prompts and Characters will be in the chapter titles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Zoe Morgan, Prompt: Strictly Business

Zoe keeps a meticulous tally of every favor that Finch and Reese owe her.

It’s on paper, with no backups, slipped in the back of a 45 record sleeve. The writing on it’s shorthand, and carefully scrubbed of any reference to their names. Instead there are dates, locations, itemized lists of business expenses - taxicabs, pay phones, things like that - and, on the far right margin, a running total of how much they would owe her should she ever come to collect.

She accepts repayment in comparable favors, and imposes no interest on their debts, and the first favor was free on credit for saving her life. There’s the occasional cross-out down the list, for when she determines they’ve done her a comparable turn.

Only once has someone come to her looking for them, someone she knew to have ties to the mob. He’d never sought her out before, and even if he hadn’t had murder on his mind he was a disagreeable customer, hiding a threat very poorly behind his up-front payment. She didn’t much care for threats, but that wasn’t usually enough for her to refuse a client.

There was a price to be paid for knowing them, and a steeper price still for letting anyone think she had someone to protect.

She points him to an identity she knew they’d discarded, letting him find the dead end himself. Those identities were who they were last time she saw them, after all; why should she know any different?

And when she gets home that evening she marks another favor in their ledger.


	2. Reese/Finch, Prompt: Fruit Stand

For all that Finch talks about remaining unpredictable and not developing habits he seems attached to few of his own.

The tracer in Finch’s glasses corresponds to a dot on Reese’s phone which, every month, returns to a specific corner in the Upper East Side; there’s a stand there, the same day every month, that sells the wine-red cherries whose stems he spots in the library trash can.

And, well, he wouldn’t want their security compromised, so if he takes the occasional side trip or asks a favor to pick up the box of cherries before Finch gets there, it’s just part of the job.


	3. Root/Shaw, Prompt: Kiss

It wasn’t the first time Shaw’d woken up zip-tied to her bed. It was the first time someone had been waiting for her when she woke.

"I remember telling you something about staying under the radar." Root looked the same at five in the morning as she did at five in the afternoon - hair neat, makeup perfect, eyes bright and trained on her like a sniper’s scope. Shaw tugged experimentally at her bonds; they were tightened to the edge of pain.

A handbag sat tipped over on the foot of the bed. Root opened it and pulled out a few sheets of paper, folded up. “Let’s see…two, three, _four_ red light cameras last night. Where do you think the radar is?”

"You told me to be average." Shaw scanned the room, finding nothing she could reach to cut the ties, only a pair of scissors peeking out of Roots’ handbag. Of course she’d known about the cameras - had run them on purpose, stared each Machine right in the eye as she did it. Root was crazier than usual if she thought she’d keep Shaw leashed to mediocrity. "Average thieves get caught."

Root shook her head, scolding, and slipped the photos back into her bag. “I knew you’d be a problem,” she went on. “So I thought, wouldn’t it save me a lot of trouble if I just kept you here? No outside phone calls, no cameras…I don’t think I was ever safer than I was in the hospital. Maybe that’s what you need.” She’d picked up the scissors from her bag, toyed with them as she spoke, and Sam tested the ties again. If she could get enough leverage, she might be able to snap them before…whatever it was Root had in mind. “Some space to yourself, where no one would find you. No one but me.”

And then Root was leaning over her, her free hand on Shaw’s pinioned wrists and driving the thin plastic into her skin, and the blade of the scissors wasn’t at her throat yet but it could be whenever she pleased. “Because maybe then, you’d start to take this seriously. Is that what you’d like?”

Shaw watched her - watched her eyes, watched her hands, wondered how she’d react if she fought. But instead she shook her head.

Root smiled, and cut the zip-ties, and kissed Shaw’s forehead in reward. “Attagirl, Sameen.”


	4. Carter/Reese, Prompt: Lace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-"The Crossing", Joss-lives AU with Joss and John in an established relationship.

One night when they get some time to themselves he asks after her fantasies, and it’s weird because she’s never been shy before, not really about anything, but when he asks that she’s suddenly too mortified to even look at him.

Because it’s different, because they were friends, dear friends before they were together, and with her ex - with everyone she’d dated too - they started out together. She knew going in the tone their interactions would take, knew what risks she was taking by letting them close and how much of herself she wanted to divulge to them and when. And he - he was out of sequence. They’d known each other’s hearts before they’d ever known each other’s bodies, and it’s different.

She confesses eventually, but it takes a lot of teasing and cajoling on his part, and she finally has to turn away from him and bury her face in the pillow before she manages to mumble that she maybe has sort of a thing about men in ladies’ underwear.

He laughs at her embarrassment and asks _is that all_ and _yes, that’s all_ she answers back, not looking at him. “It’s been a while since I told anybody, all right?”

( _It’s been a while_ has been a bit of a theme between them. It’s been a while since she’s spent the night with anyone, since she’s tried to make a relationship work, since she’s felt safe enough for any of this.)

And so that’s that, and they sleep and go back to work and forget about it, and she doesn’t see him for a few days just because of work things, and then one day he sends her a text message saying _Meet me at lunch. Behind the tram station._

His car (or somebody’s; it isn’t the usual) is parked in an alley a dozen blocks away and he’s waiting in the backseat and kisses her hard the second the door’s shut. They’ve got half an hour, maybe, before she’s called back to work again, so they don’t have any time to waste and she undoes his belt and buttons and unzips his zipper and oh dear god there’s lace under her fingers.

She stops short and pulls the waistband back and yes he is in fact wearing black lace that stretches tight over his skin and she’s surprised but just looking at him it feels like she’ll catch fire and he isn’t looking her in the eye and he rubs the back of his neck shyly and says “Do you like it?”

“ _God_ yes,” she answers; there isn’t time for more questions like where the hell he got those and did he go into an actual real store and buy them himself because she would have paid cash money to see that. “God yes, i didn’t think you were actually gonna do it.” She runs eager fingers along the garment and it feels so delicate and warm, little spirals cresting over his hipbones. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat but that just makes him fit even better against her palm. He blushes rosy pink. _Joss_ , he says, more urgent.

She nods - so little time they’ve got - and wriggles out of her own pants and underwear. She doesn’t take his off yet. She wants to feel the lace on her skin, bare, where she’s sensitive.

He gasps as she perches astride his hips, closes his eyes as she settles down against him. The fabric prickles and thrills as she moves and she pushes his shirt aside to touch him more and faster and

and her cell rings.

She curses quietly to herself and doesn’t have time to un-lean before she picks up, so she has to settle for clapping a hand over his mouth while she answers the phone. It does nothing to make him less flustered. Can’t deny she likes that.

“I’ve got to go back,” she apologizes. He whines softly in protest as she edges back off him and reaches for her underwear. “Don’t like it any more than you do, baby.”

“I wore this all day for you,” he pouts, zipping up.

“You want to explain all this to my captain, you’re welcome to come back with me.” She gestured at him, and at herself, and finishes adjusting her own clothes. “Don’t you worry, though.” She pats him before he can get up, delicately, feeling the lace beneath his trousers; she wants to leave that texture lingering on her fingers, savor it until she can be satisfied. “I don’t intend to let all that go to waste.”

“Call you when you get off shift?”

“I’ll be calling you first.”

She kisses him a hard goodbye before leaving the car.


	5. John Reese, Prompt: Library Meme

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based off a Library Prompt meme on my tumblr, where people sent me page numbers and I grabbed the closest book and had to use a line from that page in a ficlet. 
> 
> [enemyofperfect](enemyofperfect.tumblr.com) prompted me with Person of Interest, number 147. The line: “[He] was paying $200 a month to live in a single room with twelve other guys, stacked in bunk beds.” - _Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato_ by Arthur Allen.
> 
> Early Season 4, nothing whatever to do with tomatoes.
> 
> \---

John spent most nights sleeping in the hidden subway tunnel.

He stopped by the apartment once a day at least, to shower and change clothes, but it wasn’t safe to sleep in. The tunnel put another barrier between him and Samaritan’s agents. Even if (when) they found John Riley’s sparse apartment, they would have to work harder for him.

Finch fussed about it, reminding him that one of the benefits of employment was that he no longer had to sleep on benches. He’d deflected, reminding Finch that he should be varying his location too; Finch had been hiding for decades but not from so many eyes. And Finch hadn’t agreed, but he’d dropped the subject, judging the behavior not dangerous enough to argue about.

John hadn’t explained any more than that - probably couldn’t have even if he’d had to. It was a constant, that bolted-down bench.

After all, it’d been nearly three decades since he’d slept a full night, maybe more since he’d passed it on anything more yielding than a bare mattress. At fifteen he was paying $200 a month (Dad’s) to live in a single room with twelve other guys stacked in bunkbeds, glad for the threadbare bed if it meant getting far away from home; at eighteen he’d settled in a cot in his barracks that was older than he was and sagged in the middle like a nest of cheap steel; at twenty-five he was just re-learning to sleep instead of passing out; at thirty-two the nights spent in the back seat of a sedan on recon helped him forget.

Out of everything - the new name, the new life, the grieving of the old one - the bench in the darkened tunnel was usual.


End file.
